What can the urban designer do for children? Normative principles of child–friendly communities for responsive third places

This study explores the idea that all public urban places should be planned and designed keeping children in mind. Children from urban places are exposed to different types of urban and social problems. While many Western cities address the needs of children and young people, Egyptian cities overlook children’s needs and behaviours, especially in architectural terms. This study attempts to place Egyptian children at the centre of the urban agenda based on universal laws that secure children. The contribution provides procedures and design principles. A survey in Cairo was conducted through interviews with children and their parents. The results indicate that a child-friendly community can be created for positive social interaction between children, families and the built environment. The result also suggests that a third place will be the most appropriate area where a child-friendly community can be created. Such places are crucial for learning how children interact as they grow up because they are places where informal activities take place. The research concludes that for an improved built environment, it is important to focus on children’s lives in third places and what designers provide or hinder with normative design principles through the process of creating child-friendly cities.     

适当收缩规模的城市: 两个德国城市的案例

在当前城市发展领域的争论中,人们越来越认识到,欧洲的若干城市不得不面临长期萎缩的挑战。然而从国际范围看,在收缩和衰退发生时,规划范式、规划体系、规划战略和规划文化如何是否要有所改变,又该如何应对,都还不甚清晰。文章研究了收缩城市的规划如何转型,基于分析框架,提出了在面临收缩时如何识别规划模式和工具开始改变的起点。 为此,文章简要介绍了两座收缩的德国城市： 凯泽斯劳滕和茨维考。虽然凯泽斯劳滕和茨维考两个城市显示出不同萎缩城市规划模式的异同,但作者很清楚：由于他们的特殊路径和区位,这两个案例只是德国萎缩城市状况的一鳞半爪。文章着重于探讨如何处理衰退和收缩导致的城市规划变化以及不同的规划模式。文中案例展示出产业转型对德国制造业城镇的巨大影响,无论原东德还是西德,都导致失业、住房空置和人口流失的恶性循环。当谈到规划的转变,所有案例都展示出开发和再开发过程中,各种努力及其被接受的过程。被接受是一个过程,从最初的无视或否认,到关注和慢慢接受。增加人口扩大城市规模、维持现有设施和结构以阻止进一步衰退、重建和改造现有的基础设施,不同策略会导致不同的结果。大多数发展都试图挑战产生收缩的原因,设法扭转恶性循环。这些措施既可以作为扩张性规划策略的一部分,也可用于应对衰退策略,而这取决于具体做法。虽然替代性产业在各地各不相同,但它们的重要作用日益清晰：高科技、教育、医疗服务等如今都是新的经济支柱。事实上,在凯泽斯劳滕（茨维考则程度稍次）,一所大学已被证明是发展的强大动力。     

卡尔维诺的城市诗学

利用建筑现象学的理论分析卡尔维诺的小说《看不见的城市》,探讨卡尔维诺的城市诗学,指出卡尔维诺对城市的追忆和幻想,显现出城市知觉和体验的多层次的隐形特征;这种表象与知觉、物质与精神、轻盈与沉重、幸福与悲哀、梦想与绝望相互交替并相互交织的多面性晶体结构的城市诗学,既是对城市可栖居性的忧思,更是对幸福城市的梦想。     

Cities and quality of life. Quantitative modeling of the emergence of the happiness field in urban studies

Where we live affects all aspects of our life and thus our happiness. In recent years, and now for more than half of the population of the Earth, our place of residence or activity has been increasingly transformed into an urban one. However, while the impact of happiness studies has grown in importance during the last twenty years, we note that happiness-related concepts find it difficult to penetrate the planning and design of cities, and affect the field of urban studies. In this paper, we map the temporal evolution of the fields of happiness and urban studies into dynamic networks obtained by paper keywords co-occurrence analysis. We identify the main concepts of the “urban happiness” field and their capacity to agglomerate into coherent thematic clusters. We find that while quality of life and well-being are highly interconnected with some well-defined urban categories, other happiness-related concepts, as subjective well-being or happiness itself, are located in peripheral positions where their influence is minimised. We present a one-parameter spatial network model in order to reproduce the changes in the topology of these networks. Results explain the evolution and the level of interpenetration of these two fields as a function of “conceptual” distances, mapped into Euclidean ones. In addition to other approaches (i.e., co-frequency matrix of bibliometric analysis), complex networks science appears as a valid alternative and opens the way for the systematic study of other academic fields in terms of complex evolving networks.     

Social effects of urban restructuring: a case study in Amsterdam and Utrecht,the Netherlands

In the Netherlands, urban restructuring has been a major policy since 1997. Its principal aim is to improve neighbourhoods by demolishing or upgrading low-rent social dwellings and building more expensive rental or owner occupied units. A fundamental idea underlying this policy is to break up the physical and social monotony of urban areas and to achieve a mixed population in terms of income. The consequence of this new mix should be that people interact better and fully enjoy all kinds of facilities in the restructured area. This paper addresses the question of whether this new policy has indeed had these effects. The focus point is the role of the neighbourhood, featuring changes for traditional inhabitants while accommodating the newcomers. Do they use the area? Are their social contacts made there? Or can the restructured area be seen as a dormitory, where the residents have no contact with other people in the immediate environment? The paper is based on a fieldwork study undertaken in the cities of Amsterdam and Utrecht. Lessons for future policies of urban restructuring are formulated.     

各国幸福指数评价体系初探

人类社会物质财富的快速增长并未带来幸福感相应程度的提升,这一现象导致当前国际社会中开始广泛展开对幸福指数的探讨和研究。本文选取部分国家中较为完善的幸福指数体系研究成果,对其内容和作用进行介绍。这些在政府主导下产生的幸福指数体系将有利于我们全面的以及多角度的深入理解如何测量人类幸福。最后作者呼吁城市规划作为一门综合性学科,应全面了解和探讨与城市发展相关的国民幸福。     

Emotional maps based on social networks data to analyze cities emotional structure and measure their emotional similarity

The present study utilizes the social media data to sample from people's emotion in different places based on their facial expressions, for analyzing emotions distribution in a city and comparing the emotional similarity between cities. Experiencing various emotions gives birth to different facial expressions which usually have similar patterns for individuals. Extracting these patterns from face images and analyzing them makes it possible to extract related emotion associated with the shared photos. Since geo-tagged images include metadata about the geographical location, estimation of emotions spatial distribution is possible. The distribution of four emotions: anger, disgust, happiness, and surprise in twelve cities, included Athens, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Melbourn, New York, Ottawa, Paris, and Prague is investigated by analyzing geo-tagged photos shared on Flickr. After facial expressions extraction, the spatial distribution functions of the emotions are calculated by kernel density estimation method. Emotional maps for cities are created using extracted features of Fourier transform spectrum of the spatial distributions which are robust against rotation and translation. Afterward, similar cities based on their emotional structure are clustered into appropriate groups. The results are beneficial for urban planners and social researchers to analyze the effect of the environment on peoples' emotions. Furthermore, this could guide them to make right policies to improve the quality of life. Considering the four studied emtions, New York has the highest ratio in anger, Ottawa has the highest proportion of happiness and Copenhagen has the highest ratio in both surprise and disgust among the studied cities. In addition, an attempt is made to calculate the percentage of different emotions and dispersion of them as important emotional factors in understanding the emotional structure of cities. To measure the dispersion of happiness the coefficient of variation is computed. The results show that happiness dispersion in Berlin has a more uniform distribution according to the collected data. It seems both coefficients of variation and emotions percentage may be jointly effective in urban planning and cities comparison based on people emotional mode.     

TRAPPED OR ON THE SPRINGBOARD? HOUSING CAREERS IN LARGE HOUSING ESTATES IN EUROPEAN CITIES

ABSTRACT: In the first three decades after the Second World War in Europe millions of dwellings were built, in most cases on large estates in or near cities. At that time, many people in various kinds of household found these estates attractive and were happy to live on them. But, in the last two decades, in many parts of Europe social, economic, and physical problems have emerged and the reputation of the estates has suffered a deep decline. That is not to say that they have lost their function in the housing market: some groups might still be drawn to them—low‐income households who cannot find a decent, affordable place elsewhere, for example. In this article, we describe the current position of these estates in the housing careers of specific groups. Are there some groups who find them attractive places in which to live? Or do most people want to get away as soon as they can? Are some people “trapped”? We show that the situation differs substantially between parts of Europe, but even per estate and per household category. Our findings imply that intervention strategies with regard to these estates will have to become much more differentiated than they currently are.     

运动中的城市:城市规划研究的新视野--法国动态城市基金会及其城市机动性研究

城市化和城市机动性的加强已经成为当代社会发展演变的两个主要特征.运动已经成为城市发展的前提条件,是社会个体实现个人生活价值的根本要素.在越来越城市化的当代社会,经济增长与物资的流动、文化发展与人员的流动变得不可分离.这就要求我们改变对城市的传统认识,从运动中重新认识我们的城市.在这一背景下,2001年成立于巴黎的法国动态城市基金会致力于推动城市机动性的研究,并围绕三个基本研究方向制定项目计划,在全球范围积极促进城市间的合作.该文首先简要概述基金会成立的背景,随后介绍它的研究内容和主要成果,最后说明基金会与中国城市之间的合作前景.     

Ethnic Residential Clusters in Nima,Ghana

The global debate on ethnic residential segregation has focused more on the developed world, and little is known about similar patterns and processes in African cities. This is in spite of the fact that many African cities are now ranked among the world’s most rapidly growing and least regulated urban areas. Indeed, the dynamics of ethnic residential segregation have scarcely been studied in African cities. The little literature available has looked at ethnic segregation between the neighbourhoods of major cities. This paper goes beyond current literature by examining the pattern and processes of ethnic clustering within a multi-ethnic community. Our goal in this paper is to answer the question as to whether within a multi-ethnic urban neighbourhood the major ethnic groups are residentially clustered, isolated or dispersed. The focus is on Nima, a major slum community of Accra, Ghana. The findings of the study show that even though Nima is a multi-ethnic community, some level of ethnic clustering can be discerned. These patterns are linked to the history of settlement formation, religious affiliation and ethnic or place of origin of earlier house owners.     

Can we ‘Catch ‘em All’? An exploration of the nexus between augmented reality games,urban planning and urban design

Urban planners and designers have spent the last 50 years trying to activate unused public spaces, create walkable cities and encourage sociability through urban design. Pokémon Go has succeeded, almost overnight, to entice people of all demographics into the streets of cities around the world. In fact, many previously underutilized public spaces have suddenly become hot spots for all demographics, playing Pokémon Go and other similar augmented reality games (ARGs). While anecdotally it seems that ARGs activate public spaces, increase community interactions and facilitate exploration of urban spaces, little study has been done on the influence of ARGs on sense of place, or the way in which these games are influencing player engagement with the public spaces they are playing within. This paper reports the findings of a survey of 994 Australian players. The paper explores whether ARGs affect user needs being met in public spaces, and the implications of these findings for urban practitioners.     

Place and Function of African Cities in the Global Urban Network: Exploring the Matters Arising

As the world shrinks into a ‘global village’, cities have come into focus as dominant nodes in the global transactions and flows of capital, commodities, people and services. The resulting economic cum information order is not only transforming the architecture of discrete cities everywhere but is also motivating new patterns of inter-city relations and networks. Global urban network is now synonymous with the trans-state processes that make up the global economy (Taylor, Political Geography 19:5–32, 2000). Hence, cities are increasing perceived as a new ‘resource’ and ‘spring board’ for connecting to and operating at the global level. The article explores these issues with reference to the place and function of African cities in the global urban network. A city-based assessment of this nature offers a fresh and fluid scope to African development question and quest as against the more conventional ‘state-centric’ benchmarking.     

小城镇空间布局特点研究

小城镇规划是城市规划近年来研究的重点．尤其城市边缘地区小城镇发展受城市影响,发展十分迅速,更是受到了规划界的关注。本文以小城镇本身经济,人民生活特点出发,研究小城镇空间布局的特点,以及对小城镇空间布局的影响因素。     

Urban history and cultural resources in urban regeneration: a case of creative waterfront renewal

In recent decades, the role of culture and history has often become a driving factor in the process of urban regeneration. The focus on culture and history as factors in regional transformation has been particularly extensive in response not only to competitiveness among cities but also to sustainability requirements in the cultural sector. In the same perspective of this approach, culture in its broadest sense assumes a decisive role in constructing a system of interventions where employment and social and sustainable development become the product of the integration of places, people, economies and traditions. Creative cities are currently working on how to improve the interaction between regeneration building, economic development and social renewal in order to achieve more comprehensive development of the city. Existing creative cities may be seen to revolve around the design, promotion and activation of urban areas established due to their particular local characteristics. Such areas become creative clusters as a result of economic and structural innovations, related to the realization of innovator projects achieved with the help of local development strategies based on the economies of excellence, culture and territorial quality. Starting from such premises, this article aims to show the main factors which condition creativity in cities – such as new policies, participation, history, place identity, cultural resources and sustainability – and an emblematic case study of creative regeneration. This concerns the HafenCity district in Hamburg, where the history has assumed an important role in re-constructing the maritime identity and for many choices of urban nature.     

Does exposure to richer and poorer neighborhoods influence wellbeing?

Geographical differences in wellbeing have attracted increased attention in the science of happiness literature and recent research has become particularly interested in high-resolution spatial differentiation within cities. This study contributes to this literature by analyzing the relationships between subjective wellbeing and relative income at the neighborhood level using activity-travel survey data from 2010 in Hong Kong. In contrast to previous studies, the analysis concentrates not only on life satisfaction but also on pleasure derived from daily activities in the city, and considers relative income in people's residential neighborhood and the neighborhoods where they conduct different types of daily activity. The results suggest that social comparisons with regard to income matter to life satisfaction as well as emotional wellbeing, that the effects occur for both the residential neighborhood and the urban places where daily activities are undertaken, and that downward income comparisons tend to have stronger effects on wellbeing than upward comparison. One theoretical implication that follows from the analysis is that the impact of social comparison in the science of happiness needs to be theorized as dynamic, mobile and contingent upon people's daily trajectories through time and urban space.     

北京、上海、广州城市公共空间的三城记

北京、上海、广州是当前中国最具国际影响的三个城市．公共空间的形成与发展是城市关注的焦点．也影响着城市发展的未来图景。     

新型冠状病毒肺炎疫情下以人的需求为导向的规划思考

新型冠状病毒肺炎疫情的突袭给城市经济、居民生活带来极大的影响,人们恐慌健康问题的同时,也在不断反思如何提高城市防疫水平。国家应对新型冠状病毒肺炎疫情采取分级分类的防控政策,尽可能地减少疫情对城市的影响。在此背景下,文章立足"人"最基本的就业与生活需求,探讨城市规划如何通过常态化、前瞻性的措施来提高应对城市公共卫生安全问题的能力。文章提出区域、城市与社区不同层面的规划建议,如区域产业协作、设施"平灾"结合、规划留白空间、建设社区生活圈等,以期为未来城市规划实践提供参考。     

Changing urban housing form and organization in Nigeria: lessons for community planning

There has been very little research interest in historically changing patterns of urban housing form and organization and the quality of life experienced by ordinary people in designed settings. This is despite the arguments of humanistic geographers and contemporary environmental psychologists that the behavioural and socio‐cultural aspects of built form imbue environments with meanings and help to create a sense of place. This paper focuses on the development of housing forms in Nigerian cities, including the cultural motifs and the economic circumstances that have shaped their evolution over time. The analysis of pre‐colonial traditional housing forms at the core of cities is presented first followed by an appraisal of newer developments at the suburbs that were stimulated by colonial and post‐colonial market‐driven economies. Drawing on the divergent examples of the transition from traditional to modern urban housing forms, the paper reveals that social changes, particularly the shift from traditional communal family values to more Western ways of life, have had variegated impacts on building forms and residential layouts. One of these is inhabitants’ alienation from the urban environment and the seeming identification with home places of origin outside the city. The paper argues that while this situation poses a major challenge to urban planning in post‐colonial Nigeria, professional planning practice seems to have demonstrated little interest in what people think or feel about places. Ways in which new housing forms may be organized and incorporated into future programmes of urban development to promote communal belonging to Nigerian cities are articulated.     

城市轨道交通与城市空间整合发展问题初探

当代我国许多城市和其轨道交通正处于较为快速的发展期.但是由于人们对于城市轨道交通与城市互动发展的认识不足,通常造成了城市生活、城市安全、城市经济、城市生态等方面的诸多缺陷.该文探讨以城市轨道交通与人的多重城市生活需求为基础,以时间和距离为依据,探讨城市空问在轨道交通影响下的层次变化以及整合发展问题.进而提出以强化不同技...     

Safe Streets,Livable Streets

Transportation safety is a highly contentious issue in the design of cities and communities. While urban designers, architects, and planners often encourage the use of aesthetic streetscape treatments to enhance the liability of urban streets, conventional transportation safety practice regards roadside features such as street trees as fixed-object hazards and strongly discourages their use. In this study, I examine the subject of livable streetscape treatments and find compelling evidence that suggests they may actually enhance the safety of urban roadways. Concerns about their safety effects do not appear to be founded on empirical observations of crash performance, but instead on a design philosophy that discounts the important relationship between driver behavior and safety. This study traces the origin and evolution of this philosophy, and proposes an alternative that may better account for the dynamic relationships between road design, driver behavior, and transportation safety.

It has taken many decades for roadway designers to begin to recognize that how road and road environments are designed affects safety, and to identify what particular features enhance or detract from safety in a given environment. This process is still evolving. Historically, there has been a tendency for those funding research to focus on rural or high-speed environments, and on pavements and structures. One outcome of the resulting underemphasis on safety and urban design concerns, as author Eric Dumbaugh identified in this article, is the problem with the published research about urban roadside design in the U.S.: it is limited in both scope and quantity. With these limitations, it is understandable that city street designers extrapolate from principles learned in a rural highway environment. They may not be standing on the firmest ground when they do this, but they judge that it is the best ground they have.